


Between the Shadow and the Soul

by Dragonflies_and_Katydids



Series: Dawn [12]
Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Established Relationship, Light Angst, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-22
Updated: 2015-12-22
Packaged: 2018-05-08 08:16:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5490161
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dragonflies_and_Katydids/pseuds/Dragonflies_and_Katydids
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Mia comes to Skyhold and Cullen tries to answer the unanswerable.</p>
<p>Takes place about a month after <em>Exit Light</em>.</p>
<p>(I don't even know what this is.  It arrived in my head this evening and said, "WRITE ME NOW!" So I did.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Between the Shadow and the Soul

**Author's Note:**

> I don’t love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz,  
> or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:  
> I love you as one loves certain obscure things,  
> secretly, between the shadow and the soul. 
> 
> I love you as the plant that doesn’t bloom but carries  
> the light of those flowers, hidden, within itself,  
> and thanks to your love the tight aroma that arose  
> from the earth lives dimly in my body. 
> 
> I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,  
> I love you directly without problems or pride:  
> I love you like this because I don’t know any other way to love,  
> except in this form in which I am not nor are you,  
> so close that your hand upon my chest is mine,  
> so close that your eyes close with my dreams.
> 
> Pablo Neruda, One Hundred Love Sonnets: XVII (translated By Mark Eisner)

Mia has been at Skyhold a week when she asks the question Cullen has been dreading.

"Why?"

They're eating supper together in the rooms the Inquisition provided for her, a lavish suite more suitable for an Orlesian lady than a Fereldan farmer's daughter, no matter how successful that farmer. Though if Cullen is honest, he knows that the size of this suite is more about Mia's brother than her father, and how strange that is, whenever he lets himself think of it.

Whatever niceties his position earns his family, they won't help him avoid Mia's question, so he tries to stall. "How do you mean?" he asks. Not that it will help: he's had a week to anticipate this question, and he still doesn't have an answer he can voice aloud.

Mia frowns at her food, as if she's no more sure what she's asking than Cullen is sure how to answer. "I was...surprised...when I came here."

When she doesn't go on, Cullen asks, "Surprised?"

She shakes her head slowly, though Cullen isn't sure at what. "By your letter, I thought to find...I thought you had made friends here, and I was glad of it, but I...it made me sad to think that even after all these years, you still hadn't found someone to spend your life with."

There's another pause, and Cullen says, "But I have."

"Have you?" she asks, her gaze challenging as she meets his eyes at last.

"Yes." Whatever else he can or can't say, that answer is easy.

She studies him for a long time, frowning, before she says, "Your letter talked of friends rather than lovers, and yet I arrive to find not just one, but two."

A faint smile tugs at the corner of his mouth. "I can be certain of something without knowing quite how to put it in a letter. A letter our parents will read, sooner or later."

Her answering smile is just as faint, but it grants him the point. "I know. And I've spent the last week _trying_ to understand." The last word is almost plaintive, and Cullen barely controls a wince.

"Is it so hard to understand that I'm happy?" he asks, as gently as he can.

"You don't look happy," she says.

He hesitates, unsure how to answer. Happiness is a rarity in his life, and deep in his bones, he isn't sure that will ever change. Except Mia wants to hear something a little more romantic than, "I'm less miserable when I'm with them." How can he explain the hundred ways Bull and Dorian act as antidote without first explaining the poison they counteract?

So he gives her the answer he gave Cassandra, or a variant of it. "I'm learning to be happy. They're teaching me how to be."

The problem, of course, is that Cassandra has scars of her own, and though they may not run as deep as his, they still grant her more perspective than Mia will ever have. Than he ever wants Mia to have.

"Why do you have to learn to be happy?" Mia asks, frowning again, more fiercely than ever.

Unless he's prepared to explain Kinloch Hold and Kirkwall to her, there isn't really a good answer to that question. He opens his mouth twice, only to close it without saying anything.

"Is it the lyrium?" she asks at last, tentatively.

For a second, he imagines her face if he put everything in its proper context so she could understand: the lyrium is only a leash, jerking on a collar ringed with inward-pointing spikes. The collar is the problem, not the leash. Though if the leash were removed, perhaps the collar wouldn't prick him quite so often.

So it isn't entirely a lie when he says, "Yes."

"I met one of your former templars yesterday," she says. She's staring over his shoulder, her eyes tight, and Cullen is glad he didn't try to tell her more.

"I'm better than I was," he says, reaching across the table to take her hand in his.

"Are you?" she asks without looking at him.

"I am."

To his surprise, her eyes fill with tears before she blinks them away. Before he can ask, she squeezes his hand and says, "I'm glad you're doing better. And I'll love anyone who makes that possible, in any way." Her smile is supposed to be teasing, and it almost succeeds. "Even if I expected you to find a pretty girl and a bit of land to farm."

"Would I be farming the girl or the land?" Cullen asks, smiling back.

Mia smirks, her eyes brightening, and Cullen starts to relax as the conversation steps back from the cliff-edge. "Do you really need me to explain it to you?" she asks sweetly.

"No," he says, laughing. "I think I've figured it out on my own well enough."

"I certainly hope so," she murmurs, easing her hand out of his grasp.

They eat in silence for a little while, but just when Cullen thinks he might have escaped the original question, Mia says, "I've enjoyed playing chess with Dorian."

"I thought you might," Cullen says, forcing his shoulders not to tense.

"Though he does cheat abominably, doesn't he?"

"He does," Cullen agrees. "I notice you win anyway, four time out of five."

"Well," Mia says, giving him a sly look, "if he cheats, then I don't see why I can't, too."

"Mia!"

"What?" she asks innocently. "It seems only fair." She tears off a bit of bread and eats it thoughtfully. "His flirting is equally outrageous, I must say. It would be distracting, if I thought he meant anything by it."

"I find it less distracting now," Cullen admits. "When we first started playing, he could make me knock over half a dozen pieces every game with a few well-timed remarks."

"Do you find him very distracting, then?" Mia asks, still feigning innocence.

Cullen taps her shin with the toe of his boot in a perfunctory kick. "I think that's between the two of us."

"Or the three of you," Mia says, and Cullen sees the question coming barely in time to brace for it. "Unless it really only matters what Dorian thinks?"

"Mia," he sighs. He should have known they would come back to this sooner or later.

"What?" she asks. He gives her a reproving look, which she returns with a defiant look of her own.

"Why can't you leave this alone?"

"Because I don't _understand_ ," she says, bracing her hands on the edge of the table. There's no laughter in her face now. "Why both of them? Why all three of you?"

For a moment, he thinks about telling her that it isn't just the three of them, thinks of explaining Bull's tavern wenches and Dorian's stablehand and the brief pleasure any of them might find when alone on the road. He can imagine her expression were he foolish enough--or brave enough--to tell her any of that, and he has to scrub a hand over his face to smother a laugh.

When he's regained control, he says truthfully, "It's what I want. What all of us want."

She takes a deep breath in through her nose, as if she's struggling for patience. "I really have tried, this week. I want to understand, and I think I've come to understand Dorian. He's the kind of person I've always imagined you with, though I admit I expected a woman rather than a man." She tries to smile, but when he doesn't return it, the expression slides back into a frown. "But I...I don't understand Bull."

Cullen presses his lips together and stares her down in silence, all his earlier amusement gone.

Eventually, she looks away. "I'm glad if he makes you happy, but I don't understand it."

Here they are again, at the edge of the cliff staring down into the mess inside his head, and Cullen isn't prepared to share it with her. Not tonight, and possibly not ever, but without that knowledge, she only knows half of him. Less than half.

She knows the boy who wanted to be a templar more than anything, not the man who wants to forget that he ever wore a flaming sword on his breast. She doesn't know that the last time he prayed, he was standing on top of the mages' tower, not inside a chantry, and even he isn't sure whether he was praying for the strength to step back from the edge, or the strength to step forward and end it all.

He tries for a compromise, giving her a smaller truth, a single piece of the mosaic rather than the whole of it. "With Bull, I'm safe."

"Safe?" she asks, frowning in puzzlement. "Safe from what?"

_Myself._ But that's not the complete answer, and even if it was, it's not one he can give to his sister. He's stuck once again, because for her to understand, he would have to tell her all the reasons he doesn't feel safe elsewhere.

She understands what draws him to Dorian, because Dorian is fire: all light and heat, and those are things anyone would want. How can he explain that if Dorian is fire, then Bull is stone? How can he explain that he needs walls every bit as much as he needs a hearth?

"Cullen?" Mia asks, and he blinks back to the present. "Safe from _what_?"

"From the things I'm afraid of," he says.

She laughs nervously, as if she thinks he's joking. "I always thought you weren't afraid of anything."

"I wasn't," he says, and her laughter trails off. "I learned better."

###

Later--after he's re-directed the conversation and perhaps told enough jokes that she'll forget the whole thing--he makes his slow way along the battlements to Bull's room. Skyhold is as silent as it ever gets, his footsteps echoing in the crisp air, the guards' murmured greetings barely louder. The cold and the greetings both are welcome, grounding him firmly in the present rather than letting him drift into the past.

There's a faint orange glow under Bull's door, and when he steps quietly into the room, he finds only a single candle lit. It's just bright enough to show him the bed where Bull is stretched out on his back with Dorian lying on his chest. The blankets are pulled high, almost over Dorian's head, but one of Bull's legs is hanging half off the side of the bed, exposed to the cold air.

Cullen smiles, what feels like his first real smile in days. For a man who's always complaining about being cold, Dorian gives off heat like a blacksmith's forge, and sleeping underneath him would be enough to make anyone too warm.

"Have a good evening?" Bull asks, almost a whisper.

"It was nice to spend time with her, just the two of us," Cullen says.

Bull's eye narrows slightly, as if he hears all the things Cullen isn't saying, but he doesn't press for details.

From his nest of blankets, Dorian stirs enough to smile at him, drowsy and welcoming, and Cullen feels some of the tension leave him as he watches Bull's fingers move idly through Dorian's hair.

"Come to bed?" Dorian asks, the words sleep-blurred.

"I think so," Cullen says, but before he takes off his clothes, he crosses the room to press one kiss to Dorian's temple and another to Bull's mouth. From this close, he can smell sweat and sex on their skin, and it isn't a complete surprise when Dorian trails a finger along the side of his neck in sleepy invitation.

Cullen catches his hand and kisses the palm, then lays it back on Bull's chest, holding it there until Dorian makes a disapproving grunt and stops trying to break free.

"Shhhh," Cullen whispers, kissing his temple again. He only has to shift a few inches to kiss the backs of Bull's fingers where they're rubbing slow circles against Dorian's scalp, and he stays there for a moment, breathing in the smell of them.

It doesn't take him long to get ready for bed, and soon enough he's slipping under the blankets, settling into his usual place against Bull's side. He faces Bull tonight, an arm over his chest with Dorian curled up against his back, and a little more tension seeps out of him as the three of them settle together. One of Cullen's hands stretches wide across Bull's chest, Dorian's on top of his, their fingers laced loosely together.

Pressed between Dorian's heat and Bull's solid bulk, Cullen thinks about nothing and waits for sleep to find him.


End file.
